Jan. 05–Orange County sheriff’s supervisors linked to the misuse of jailhouse informants during a scandal that rocked the county’s justice system more than four years ago were recently promoted to the upper echelons of the department.
Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders, who uncovered the civil rights violations at the jail in 2014, said in court papers Friday that the promotions of Jon Briggs and William Baker to assistant sheriff showed the department’s insincerity in correcting the misdeeds:
"Briggs and members of the executive team created an embarrassingly misleading narrative designed to protect supervisors and leadership by suggesting they were hapless victims of rogue deputies who inexplicably hid their informant efforts from their supervisors, even as those deputies documented their work daily in a readily accessible log," Sanders wrote. "Of course, the OCSD’s narrative was nonsensical."